This work investigates aperiodicities that occur in the sustained portion of a sound of musical instrument played by a human player, due to synchronous versus asynchronous deviations of the partial phases. By using an additive sinusoidal analysis, phases of individual partials are precisely extracted and their correlation statistics and coupling effects are analyzed. It is shown that various musical instruments exhibit different phase coupling characteristics. The effect of phase coupling is compared to analysis by means of higher order statistics and it is shown that both methods are closely mathematically related. Following a detailed analysis of phase coupling for various musical instruments it is suggested that phase coupling is an important characteristic of a sustained portion of sound of individual musical instruments, and possibly even of instrumental families. Interesting differences in phase deviations where found for the flute, trumpet and cello. For the cello, the effect of vibrato is examined by comparing the analysis of a closed string sound played with a natural vibrato to analysis of an open string sound that contains no vibrato. Following, a possible model for phase deviations in the cello is presented and a simulation of phase fluctuations for this model is performed.

Multireference, scan-based near-field acoustical holography is a useful measurement tool that can be applied when an insufficient number of microphones is available to make measurements on a complete hologram surface simultaneously. The scan-based procedure can be used to construct a complete hologram by joining together subholograms captured using a relatively small, roving scan array and a fixed reference array. For the procedure to be successful, the source levels must remain stationary for the time taken to record the complete hologram; that is unlikely to be the case in practice, however. Usually, the reference signal levels measured during each scan differ from each other with the result that spatial noise is added to the hologram. A procedure to suppress the effects of source level, and hence reference level, variations is proposed here. The procedure is based on a formulation that explicitly features the acoustical transfer functions between the sources and both the reference and scanning, field microphones. When it is assumed that source level changes do not affect the sources’ directivity, a nonstationarity compensation procedure can be derived that is based on measured transfer functions between the reference and field microphones. It has been verified both experimentally and in numerical simulations that the proposed procedure can help suppress spatially distributed noise caused by the type of source level nonstationarity that is characteristic of realistic sources.